Ronnie Wilbur

Research Interests / Training Areas:

Biography:

Dr. Ronnie Wilbur is a theoretical and experimental linguist who investigates language structure and learning problems. Over her career, she has been responsible for several research breakthroughs.

From a major multi-school study, she provided the evidence that knowledge of sign language in deaf children does not interfere with acquisition of English and that their literacy difficulties can be traced to other causes (insufficient input and interaction, teaching approaches).

She demonstrated that sign languages have syllables with functions like those in spoken language (NSF funding).

She uncovered the stress system of ASL and showed how sentence level stress differs dramatically from English, but is similar to well-studied languages like Catalan. This difference makes it clear that ASL is not merely a manual form of English.

She discovered that what looks like a question-answer pair, often called ‘rhetorical question structure’, is syntactically and prosodically a complex single sentence with an information focus function.

She has shown that sign language grammatical facial expressions (blinks, brows, headshakes) are controlled by the same semantic operators that appear in spoken language syntactic structures (NIH).

From cross-linguistic sign language research, she showed that Croatian Sign Language has the same word order as ASL, whereas Austrian Sign Language uses subject-object-verb instead (NSF).

With Nicoletta Adamo-Villani, she developed MathsignerTM, animated ASL math software for K-2 deaf children (NSF).

She has formulated and experimentally tested the Event Visibility Hypothesis as an explanation for so-called iconicity of signs, and is now considering its evolutionary implications.

Awards include Focus Award (service), Seed for Success (funding in excess of million dollars), and member Purdue Book of Great Teachers. She served as editor-in-chief of Sign Language & Linguistics 1998-2006. Her teaching responsibilities include courses in general linguistics (syntax, semantics), linguistic structure of ASL, deafness, and bilingualism.